Farm Area Clings to Its Roots

At the age of 81, Santa Paula rancher Anita Tate is one of the last stewards of farmland in Southern California, holding it for a new generation.

The problem was that nobody seemed very interested in taking over.

Tate’s pioneer Ventura County family helped settle what is now the last large farming valley in coastal Southern California.

Until last year, however, she had found no heir interested in managing the lemon and avocado orchards on her Santa Clara Valley ranch.

Then granddaughter Lisa Tate, 21, stepped forward.

She had come to her grandmother’s 200-acre Rancho Filoso as a child. She came again last summer to spray weeds, wrap trees and fix sprinklers. Now she says she will take over once she leaves Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in agribusiness.

“I’ve finally found a replacement,” said Anita Tate, a Berkeley-educated psychology major who has helped operate her family farm for 50 years. “She worked really hard for us. And she’s got the spirit.”

In a region where farming remains only in small patches on the fringes of urbanization, the Santa Clara Valley--stretching 30 miles along the Santa Clara River from Ventura to Six Flags Magic Mountain--is a throwback.

One hundred years ago, a visitor could have ridden from one end of the valley to the other and seen nothing but vast orchards and fields separating the small towns of Saticoy, Santa Paula, Fillmore and Piru.

It’s much the same today, except walnut orchards have given way to lemons, avocados and what remains of aging Valencia orange groves.

“The folks who come from Los Angeles are just amazed at what still exists up here,” said Pierre Tada, chief executive of 108-year-old Limoneira Co., one of the largest lemon growers in the state.

“They’re amazed there is still a farming valley that’s alive and well, or relatively well.”

The value of Ventura County crops exceeded $1 billion last year for the first time, ranking it the 10th most productive in the state alongside the counties of the Central Valley, the world’s most bountiful farm region.

The slender Santa Clara Valley, framed by mountain peaks as high as 6,000 feet, produces about one-third of Ventura County’s crops on about 33,000 irrigated acres.

“In many respects, this valley is doing just fine,” said Earl McPhail, county agricultural commissioner. “And there’s a good chance it will stay this way for 25 years, at least. But as time goes on, the growth pressures will be just phenomenal.”

Yet, even after Ventura County’s strict voter-approved Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiatives expire about 2020, there is a chance the valley’s deep, loamy topsoil could still yield crops and that development would occur mostly on low hills and plateaus--overlooking the lush green farm belt, not replacing it.

“As we develop less-toxic pesticides, I think crops and humans are going to be able to coexist much better,” McPhail said.

Ventura County, a slow-growth bastion, is not likely to welcome much growth. At least not right away.

Both farm owners and city dwellers protested when the Santa Clara Valley’s largest landowner, Newhall Land & Farming Co., announced plans to build a 70,000-resident community just across the Los Angeles County line near Magic Mountain.

Newhall owns 16,000 additional acres in Ventura County, immediately east of its planned Newhall Ranch mini-city. But just 1,200 acres are cropland. So in 30 years, when Newhall’s current project is complete, critics suspect the Ventura County acreage will serve as the next development opportunity.

“We have no plans for development on the Ventura County side,” Newhall spokeswoman Marlee Lauffer said. “You’ll continue to see agricultural activities on that property for many, many years to come.”

Pioneers Sought Opportunities

The Santa Clara Valley’s pioneer families were also looking for opportunities when they arrived to find a valley where wild yellow mustard grew so high horseback riders had to stand in their stirrups to see over it.

At one end of the valley, Massachusetts transplant Henry Mayo Newhall spent part of a fortune made as a Gold Rush-era auctioneer on 48,000-acre Rancho San Francisco, a swath running 20 miles from Valencia to Piru.

At the other end, Pennsylvania speculators found oil so plentiful they tunneled into the side of mountains near Santa Paula, and thick black crude simply ran into barrels. They founded Union Oil in 1890.

And in the flatlands along the river, merchants and farmers from Ohio, Virginia and Maine came to start cities and experiment with crops.

“They were all opportunists,” said Santa Paula farmer Alan Teague, 63, the son of a Ventura County congressman and grandson of the founding president of Limoneira and the Sunkist farming cooperative.

When Santa Paula rancher Dorcas Thille’s great-grandfather, Jefferson Crane, and his uncle, horticulturist George Briggs, came to the valley in the early 1860s, Briggs brought a stake of 25,000 pieces of gold from the Sierra Nevada foothills.

“He decided there was more gold in miners’ pockets than in the ground,” Thille said. “He sold watermelon at $5 a piece to the miners.”

With the money, Briggs bought the 15,000-acre Rancho Santa Paula y Saticoy. He imported peach and apple trees from Ohio, but gophers and drought killed them. So Briggs subdivided the huge ranch and sold most of it off in 150-acre tracts for $10 an acre.

Nathan Blanchard, a native of Maine via Northern California, bought part of it and then recorded the township of Santa Paula in 1875.

Over the next 20 years, the outlines of the valley’s economy took shape, as Wallace Hardison, C.C. Teague and Samuel Edwards joined Blanchard and many others to build a region that rivaled seaside Ventura for economic prosperity.

In the hills, oil fields sprouted. In the valleys, farmers experimented with oranges, lemons, pineapples and bananas. And they began to plant what for decades was the valley’s predominant crop--walnuts.

Today, the descendants of those families are still community leaders. But it has become increasingly hard for them to farm the land and make a profit or to interest their children in taking over family businesses.

Thille, 69, a widow for 29 years, farms several hundred acres near Santa Paula, some of it owned by her three youngest sons, all of whom are in the computer business.

“Farmers don’t retire,” she said. “And the land that’s in the strongest hands, where the children have kept that tie to the land, I think they’ll try to keep it going.”

But pressures are increasing on farmers as the costs of water, energy and labor soar, and free trade agreements open U.S. markets to products from foreign countries. The current worry is about lemon imports from Argentina. Ventura County produces about $200 million worth of lemons a year.

Alan Teague, whose family has helped run Limoneira since its founding in 1893, merged the last of his privately held land with that giant agricultural combine eight years ago. The Edwards family sold its sizable acreage to Limoneira in 1985.

Limoneira now owns 4,100 acres in Ventura County and 2,000 in the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno and Porterville.

Still, it’s a struggle to compete.

“It’s not a level playing field. A lot of other growing areas have a cost advantage,” said Limoneira chief Tada, 43. “Farmers are going to have to embrace change in order to survive.”

The shape of that change can be seen along two-lane Sycamore Road outside Fillmore.

A mile down the road from California 126, Steve Barnard is planning to bulldoze his last 30 acres of Valencia orange trees.

“Farming’s a tough business,” said Barnard, 48, whose great-great-grandfather was the first sheriff of what was once a combined Ventura-Santa Barbara County. “The rules are changing every day. And you’ve just got to do what you do better all the time.”

In his lifetime, the biggest change Barnard has seen has been in crops: “It used to be walnuts here, then it went to citrus and now it’s going to avocados.”

But the lives of the farmers have changed, too.

“You used to be able to live off of 40 acres,” he said. “Now you have to have an outside job.”

Barnard’s outside job has turned lucrative. He founded Mission Produce in 1983, and today his operation processes 2 million pounds of avocados each week and has 1,200 employees in Oxnard and Mexico.

Not far from Barnard’s aging orange orchard, a Los Angeles company has replaced traditional crops with a huge plant and tree nursery, a development farmers say is increasingly common in the Santa Clara Valley.

Around another bend field biologist Jason Rudstrom, 28, is introducing another change. He is using modern science to fight leaf-eating pests by coating lemon trees with an experimental white dust.

“It’s like baby powder,” he said. “The [glassy-winged] sharpshooter doesn’t like to walk on it, so it keeps them off of the trees.”

It will probably take three years for Kaolin powder to prove its worth and be approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency so a grower can buy it at a local store, he said.

Toward the end of Sycamore Road, at Limoneira-owned La Campagna Ranch, foreman John Ortega has climbed a rutted dirt road up a hillside to support sapling avocado trees with 6-foot redwood stakes.

Ortega, 45, has lived or worked at 300-acre La Campagna Ranch since he was 3 years old.

His parents moved there for farm jobs in the 1950s, and Ortega and his brother were working the fields by the time they were 16. They are both still Limoneira employees.

History Motivates Younger Generation

Anita Tate has that same feeling for the fields. That is one reason she still slips on her small white tennis shoes to trudge the orchards of Rancho Filoso.

Another reason, of course, is that she has little choice until granddaughter Lisa arrives to take over.

“We are one of the few operations that have stayed in the family,” said Anita Tate, who lives with husband Elbert at the back of a canyon in a Spanish-style house her parents built in 1928. “Many of the others have either broken up or merged with Limoneira.”

Lisa Tate, raised a city girl in Moorpark, said she is drawn to the farm because of her grandmother, and increasingly because of her family’s history.

“My family kept these great journals,” said the Cal Poly senior. “My great-grandfather ran his ranch up into his 80s. And my grandmother is the person I look up to and admire the most in my life. Did you know, she was president of Sunkist for years?”

After a training period, Lisa hopes not only to run Rancho Filoso, but also to manage a separate 340-acre family-owned farm.

“I think I’m gaining a lot,” she said. “I get to live on a ranch. I’m inside half the day and outside half the day. And I get to be boss. I think it would really be neat if I could stay in agriculture my whole life.”